Secrets, Schemes, and Lots of Guns: Inside John McAfee’s Heart of Darkness

[The following piece ran on Gizmodo.com on November 12, 2012]

As dawn broke over the interior of Belize on April 30, an elite team of 42 police and soldiers, including members of the country’s SWAT team and Special Forces, converged on a compound on the banks of a jungle river. Within, all was quiet. The police called out through a bullhorn that they were there looking for illegal firearms and narcotics, then stormed in, breaking open doors with sledgehammers, handcuffing four security guards, and shooting a guard dog dead. The compound’s owner, a 67-year-old white American man, emerged bleary-eyed from his bedroom with a 17-year-old Belizean girl. The police cuffed him and took him away, along with his guards.

Inside, the cops found $20,000 in cash, a lab stocked with chemistry equipment, and a small armory’s worth of firearms: seven pump-action shotguns, one single-action shotgun, two 9-mm. pistols, 270 shotgun cartridges, 30 9-mm. pistol rounds, and twenty .38 rounds. Vexingly for the police, all of this was actually legal. The guns were licensed and the lab appeared not to be manufacturing drugs but an herbal antibacterial compound.

After fourteen hours, the police let the man and his employees go, but remained convinced they had missed something. Why else would a wealthy American playboy hole himself up out here, far from the tourist zone on the coast, by a navigable river that happened to connect, twenty miles downstream, with a remote corner of the Mexican border? Why else would he hire, as head of security, a rogue cop who’d once plotted to steal guns from the police and sell them to drug traffickers?

It’s not too unusual for eccentric gringos to wind up in Central America and slowly turn stranger—”Rich white men who come to Belize and act strangely are kind of a type,” one local journalist told me. But this one’s story is more peculiar than most. John McAfee is a founding father of the anti-virus software industry, an inveterate self-promoter who built an improbable web security empire on the principles of trust and reliability, then poured his start-up fortune into a series of sprawling commune-like retreats, presenting himself in the public eye as a paragon of engaged, passionate living: “Success, for me,” he has said, “is being able to wake up in the morning and feel like a 12 year old.” But down in Belize, McAfee the enlightened Peter Pan seems to have refashioned himself into a kind of final-reel Scarface. Continue reading Secrets, Schemes, and Lots of Guns: Inside John McAfee’s Heart of Darkness

How Psychopaths Remain Invisible

The word “psychopath” gets thrown around a lot, but in psychiatry it has a specific meaning. Psychopaths are aggressively narcissistic and impulsive and feel a relentless urge for sensation-seeking. They lack empathy and compulsively manipulate others through bullying or deceit. They believe that they are exempt from the rules and show a marked predilection for lying, even when it is not advantageous for them. Continue reading How Psychopaths Remain Invisible

Distant Tracks

A striking visual echo between two very different things:

The image on the left was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars. (I found it here.) It’s a zoom-in from outer space, showing the newly arrived Curiosity rover shortly after it began trundling around on the surface of the Red Planet. As a science fan, I find it incredibly wonderful that we not only have a brand-new mobile lab roaming Mars, but we can look down on the surface from orbit with telescopes so powerful they can make out the rover and even the twin tracks it has left behind in the soil. In this image Curiosity has just left its touchdown spot; the bluish (false color, btw) splotch to the lower right is where the “sky hook” retro rockets have blasted away the dust from the underlying bedrock. What we have, in essence, is a story in a single image — the arrival of a visitor to a distant planet, and the beginning of its exploratory career.

The image to the right shows another wanderer and its strikingly similar set of tracks. It’s a little hard to read, so here’s a rendering of the tracks alone, without all the extraneous background detail:

Here we see not the beginning of a journey, but the end.  The circle to the left is the fossilized remains of a horseshoe crab very much like the kind that wash up on beaches today. Some 150 million years ago, during the reign of the dinosaurs, this individual got swept by a wave out of the ocean and into a stagnant lagoon. The water there had no oxygen, so the clock was ticking. The creature managed to scurry along the muddy bottom for 32 feet before expiring. Apparently it’s not entirely unusual for fossilized horseshoe crabs to turn up alongside traces of their final steps; what’s special about this one is that this particular set of tracks tells an entire story, from the disturbed area of mud where the wave deposited the beast, to the meandering course it took as it sought to escape, to its moment of death. To see the whole set of tracks, and read a more detailed story, click here.

What I love about these pictures is how similar they seem, though they represent two very different kinds of wanderers, separated by hundreds of millions of years and hundreds of millions of miles. Nabokov famously opined that true literature can be recognized as a thing that creates an “indescribable tingle of the spine.” What tends to be overlooked, it seems to me, is that science can create that same feeling.

Human-Powered Helicopters Go Head to Head

The field of human-powered flight achieved an unlikely milestone yesterday when, for the first time, two independent teams went head-to-head in an attempt to win the Sikorsky Prize. Unclaimed after 22 years, the Prize—a human-powered hover of 60 seconds and an altitude of three meters altitude while remaining within a 10-meter square box—has long been believed by many aeronautists to be flatly impossible to attain. But recent achievements have convinced most observers that not only will the prize fall, but it will fall soon.

Before this year, attempts were few and far between, with only three machines ever managing to leave the ground. In 1989, a craft built by students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo stayed airborne for 7.1 seconds. Five years later, Yuri I, built by students at Nihon University in Japan, flew for 19.5 seconds. After a dormant long period, the prize was reinvigorated in 2009 when the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation bumped the prize amount up from $25,000 to its present quarter million. Last year, a team from the University of Maryland’s A.J. Clark School of Engineering achieved 11.4 seconds with a machine dubbed Gamera.

Given all those anemic results, it’s no wonder skepticism remained rife. But this summer the Gamera team fielded a larger, lighter-weight version of its earlier machine, this one called Gamera II, that quickly racked up a string of stunning achievements. This past June, the team upped their best time to an astounding 50 seconds, then in early August improved that to 70 seconds. The duration requirement was in their grasp, but could they pull off the altitude? A three-day visit by an official from the National Aeronautic Association, who could certify a bid for the Sikorsky Prize, was scheduled for Tuesday, August 28 to Thursday, August 30.

Meanwhile, 300 miles to the north, a secretive insurgent campaign was underway…

Read the rest of the story at Popular Mechanics.

The U.S. Army’s New ‘Battle Blimp’

For years, aeronautical dreamers have extolled the promise of hybrid airships—blimp-like aircraft that rely on a combination of buoyant gases and dynamic lift to fly. Such a craft, they say, could achieve the efficiency of a lighter-than-air vehicle and the controllability of a conventional airplane—but repeated attempts to fulfill this vision have so far come to naught.

Earlier this month, however, Northrop Grumman achieved the first flight of what may well prove to be the first operationally successful hybrid airship. The Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, or LEMV, is a 300-foot-long triple-hulled blimp scheduled to be deployed to southwestern Asia next year, where it will loiter at 20,000 feet for up to three weeks at a time, providing a round-the-clock surveillance-coverage capability equivalent to that of 25 fixed-wing drones. Northrop Grumman provided PM these exclusive images of the blimp during its initial testing phase in Lakehurst, N.J.

The LEMVtook off for the first time in the late afternoon of August 8 and flew for 90 minutes. Although the craft is designed to operate autonomously under the guidance of its own control system, two Northrop Grumman employees occupied it during the flight test.

Read the full story, and see more exclusive photos, at Popular Mechanics.

What Your iPhone Does to Your Brain

About three years ago, Search and Rescue professionals started to notice a change in the kind of emergency calls that were coming in. Typically, a rescue mission would start when a hiker failed to report in by a designated time. But then, with increasing frequency, the calls started coming from the missing people themselves: “Hi, I can’t find my trail, I don’t know where I am, I don’t have anything to eat, and it’s getting dark. Can you come get me?” The reason for the change was simple: more people were getting cell phones. Today, of course, everyone does, and the majority of missing-person searches are now initiated by the missing.

This has turned out to be a mixed blessing for Search and Rescue. On the one hand, lost hikers with cell phones don’t have to wait for a day or two before a search gets underway. On the other hand, more people are getting into trouble, because they know that if worse comes to worse, they’re just a phone call away from help. You don’t really need to study a map before you go into the back country, or carry a first aid kit, or enough food and clothes to get you through the night. Just make sure your cell phone bill’s paid up. People head off into the wilderness without thinking about it very much, because they feel that they don’t have to.

The dumbing down of backcountry rescue is just one example of a trend that’s affecting almost every aspect of our cognitive life. I call in mental outsourcing. More and more we’re using technology, especially smartphones, as auxiliary brains, delegating to them mental functions—such as memory, sense of direction, and problem-solving—that we used to routinely do ourselves. Which is perfectly understandable: Why do things the hard way when the easy way is right there at your fingertips? But a growing body of research suggests that the more we offload mental effort, the more we lose the ability to perform those functions for ourselves, with measurable degradation of the corresponding brain regions. Our clever gadgets, in other words, are making us dumb. Continue reading What Your iPhone Does to Your Brain

I’ll Try Anything: Riding Shotgun with Aerobatic Champ Kirby Chambliss

Every year Kirby Chambliss, a five-time national aerobatic champion and Red Bull racer, performs his airshow routine for the crowd at the EAA Airventure fly-in at Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It’s a gut-churning spectacle, an aggressive, low-altitude sequence of end-over-end tumbles, tail slides, flat spins, at what have you. Having ridden along with a few aerobatic pilots in the past, my main thought while watching Chambliss has always been: Thank God I’m not in that plane.

Then a few days before this year’s show I got an email from a PR representative at GoPro, one of Chambliss’ sponsors, asking me if I wanted to go along for a ride. My first reaction was to shudder. But as someone who writes a column called “I’ll Try Anything,” I feel a necessity to keep an open mind about things. So I said yes.

I met Chambliss and his team at 8am at a hanger at the north end of the field. The plane, a half-million dollar custom job that’s entirely built in the United States, was a gleaming work of art in aluminum tubing and carbon fiber: Strong, powerful, precise. “No matter what you do to this plane in the air, you can’t break it,” Chambliss assured me. I zipped into a flight suit, strapped on a parachute, and climbed into the front seat.

The drawback to flying at Oshkosh is that there are always a ton of airplanes trying to land and take off, making for long waits in the sweltering heat. By the time we finally were ordered to lineup on the runway, the prospect of getting up into the cool clean air with Chambliss was actually starting to seem appealing.

We climbed to 3000 feet, and the show began. Continue reading I’ll Try Anything: Riding Shotgun with Aerobatic Champ Kirby Chambliss

Can You Really Be Helplessly Addicted to Heavy Metal, Skittles, or Sunday Football?

Roger Tullgren had a problem. The heavily tattooed and multiply pierced 42-year-old Swedish dishwasher was having a tough time holding down a job. The problem was that Tullgren had very strong feelings out heavy metal, and about Black Sabbath in particular. He just couldn’t function without the sweet straits of death metal peeling the paint off his workplace walls. His employers and coworkers often felt differently, and as a result Tullgren kept finding himself out of work. Then, at last, psychologists came to the music lover’s aid. They declared that he had a full-blown disability in the form of a psychological dependence on Black Sabbath. That’s right, he was addicted to rock. And so his employer had to give Tullgren special dispensation to rock out while doing the dishes.

This is how addiction has come to be seen: no longer a hazard exclusively associated with drugs and alcohol, but one lurking in any pleasurable experience. Enjoy candy? According to Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, sugar is a habit-forming toxin. “It’s addictive,” he told the New Scientist.

Fancy a bit of pigskin? “For some people, watching football can become an obsession,” University of Alabama psychologist Josh Klapow told the college’s web site, UAB News, which noted that “a football addiction can endanger relationships and wreak havoc on the life of a super-fan.”

Hang out on Facebook? “Internet addiction” is one of the new mental illnesses being weighed for inclusion in the DSM-V, the latest revision of psychology’s diagnostic bible. And the American Society of Addiction Medicine thinks that the DSM is being too conservative. They would like to porn, gambling, and even eating to be categorized right alongside heroin and cocaine. “Addiction is addiction,” ASAM member Dr. Raju Haleja told the web site The Fix. “It doesn’t matter what cranks your brain in that direction.”

This profusion of addictions represents a cultural change in how we explain unacceptable behavior. Continue reading Can You Really Be Helplessly Addicted to Heavy Metal, Skittles, or Sunday Football?

The Limits of Aviation Safety

French aviation authorities have released the final report on the June 1, 2009 crash of Air France 447, one of aviation’s most dramatic and troubling disasters. And though earlier reports painted a fairly clear picture of what transpired, there is one surprise in the final documents—the extent to which the authorities blame not mechanical failures but the actions of the flight crew. The Bureau d’Enquete et d’Analyse (BEA) suggests that the accident “shows the limits of the current safety model.” That is, there is an element of fatal risk so deeply baked into modern aviation that it may be unfixable.

A quick recap of the Air France investigation: As PM’s December 2009 cover story reported, suspicion initially centered on the aircraft’s pitot tubes. Data sent by the aircraft in the moments before its disappearance suggested that these airspeed sensors had iced up and stopped working. Most aviation experts assumed that the pitot tubes’ failure and the severe weather (the crew had flown into a severe thunderstorm) were the key factors in this disaster.

But when searchers finally recovered the plane’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorders (commonly called black boxes) from the ocean depths in early 2011, those recorders painted a much different picture. Investigators determined that the loss of airspeed was in fact a minor hiccup that would not have endangered the flight if pilots had followed proper procedures. What doomed the flight was a series of almost incomprehensible mistakes on the part of the flight crew. Two were particularly astounding. First, a co-pilot at the controls pulled the plane up into a climb—simply leveling out the aircraft could have saved it. Second, he and the two other pilots on the flight deck failed to realize that, as a result of climbing, the plane had entered an aerodynamic stall and began plummeting toward the ocean.

The BEA’s final report offers revealing insight into the psychological factors behind these failures. Continue reading The Limits of Aviation Safety

The Toughest Challenge in Aviation

The endurance record for a human-powered plane is nearly 4 hours, set in 1988 when an MIT-built plane pedaled 70 miles from Crete to Santorini in Greece. The longest a human-powered helicopter (HPH) has been able to stay aloft? Nineteen seconds.

This pretty much tells you what you need to know about the challenge of building a human-powered helicopter, which remains one of aviation’s great unsolved challenges. Aeronautical dreamers, however, are a dauntless bunch. Their ultimate goal is the Sikorsky Prize, a $250,000 purse established in 1980 that will go to whoever can build an HPH capable of staying aloft for at least 1 minute and reaching a height of 3 meters (10 feet). Now the team behind the successful ornithopter, the Snowbird, is trying for the Sikorsky Prize—and asking for the Internet’s help.

You may remember Todd Reichert as the man who headed the University of Toronto’s human-powered ornithopter project and pedaled the aircraft during a series of successful flights. (He was also in the news more recently as one of the leading voices in debunking the Jarno Smeets video hoax before its perpetrator finally confessed.) Now a newly minted Ph.D., Reichert has joined Cameron Robertson in forming a group to assemble a machine they call Atlas. As of today, the project is nearly halfway to its $30,000 Kickstarter goal, with 15 days to go.

It’s a fair chunk of change for a few seconds of flight. But building a human-powered helicopter is an extraordinary endeavor. To stay aloft, any aircraft must push air down. The engineer’s choice is either to push a small volume of air down very quickly (like a Harrier jump jet’s turbines) or a large amount of air slowly (like a glider’s long wings). The latter is vastly more efficient. Unfortunately, if you want to hover in a helo, that means you have to move a huge amount of air, so your rotors have to be exceedingly long. Long rotors mean more weight, which means you need more lift, which means you need longer rotor blades. Reichert estimates that a viable Sikorski Prize contender would need to be the size of a Boeing 737, yet only weigh about 100 pounds.

That’s why the contestants so far have all fallen so short. In the three-plus decades since the Sikorsky Prize began, only three craft have managed to get off the ground at all. The most recent contender to achieve this modest goal came from the University of Maryland, which last summer got a craft dubbed Gamera off the ground for 4.2 seconds. That team is now working on a followup, Gamera II, that has been reengineered to be lighter and stronger.

Reichert and Robertson will try to top that by optimizing every inch of their craft through computer-model testing and pushing materials science to its limits. Atlas will consist of four rotors arranged horizontally in a diamond configuration, with the piloted seated in the middle. Each two-blade rotor will be constructed of foam and balsa ribs on a central spar made of carbon-fiber tubes. “We test these tubes to failure,” Reichert says. “That way, we know we’re using the smallest amount of material to hold the most amount of weight.”

Read the rest of the article on the Popular Mechanics website.